


i'd draw you in my favorite color

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: GOT7, Miss A
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22056124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: Suzy, Jinyoung, and the wild goose chase of love.
Relationships: Bae Suji | Suzy/Park Jinyoung (GOT7)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23
Collections: #teamprocrastinators' holiday fic exchange 2019





	i'd draw you in my favorite color

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hachimitsuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hachimitsuto/gifts).



> **dearest shida ♡**
> 
> when i first got my assignment i don't know why but i laughed!! i was honestly at a loss on how to incorporate your prompt (yellow) but i hope this is satisfactory... i guess we both wrote each other 2 fics this year hehe ♡ thank you for being such a lovely friend to me TT ♡♡♡ i'm sorry this fic makes no sense!!
> 
> and to the rest of #teamprocrastinators: my favorite stories about this exchange this year are 1) after getting hannah out of retirement last year, she was the first one to finish while the rest of us had nothing until 2 days before the deadline (yeoksi team p...), 2) yun [and me] not knowing the deadline was 12/31 lksdgasjdf! i'm so lucky to know and be friends with you all TT___TT love you all and i hope 2020 and the new decade is kind to us!! ♡♡♡

Jinyoung had this innate tendency to measure his connections with people by how much he could potentially hurt them. As horrible as it could've been, this did not make him a bad person by nature, and he'd mostly outgrown the habit over the years – that, or he'd become such a stranger to Suzy that she could no longer read his carefully constructed facade, even in the warm lights of her new apartment. Both possibilities were equally probable, and terrifying.

"Sorry it's so stuffy," Suzy tells him, prying open the kitchen window. She'd spent the past month filming her latest drama in Spain, and Jinyoung looked so, so foreign sitting stiffly on the L-shaped sofa that arrived the day before she'd left. There were still dishes in her kitchen sink that she hadn't gotten around to washing and piles of only-worn-for-an-hour clothes scattered around the living room. There'd even been a used condom tied up in her on-suite bathroom trash bin that she noticed while washing her hands. She haphazardly covered it with tissues before turning off the light, as if it mattered.

Jinyoung shakes his head. Suzy starts clearing her kitchen counter, throwing half-finished perishables into a plastic bag. "Do you need help?" he offers, walking over to the other side of the marble island.

"No!" Suzy laughs. "I –" she looks at the expiration date on an old bottle of soju, one sip left at the bottom. Puts it in the sink and does not look at him. "You should just go make yourself comfortable. I'll get us something to drink."

Jinyoung's reflection shifts in her shiny countertop. "Suzy," he starts softly, as if not to startle her. She can see him lean over on his elbows into the space she'd just cleared. He waits. Suzy tells herself not to look at him.

He sighs after a minute in defeat, staring at his palms. His hands are amber in the kitchen light, but she knows they'd be cold if she held them in hers, and there's a shadow on his upper lip of where he hadn't shaved, and there's all the possibilities of what he could say to hurt her blooming around him like flowers in an endless field, ripe with their open faces turned toward him, tempting him to pick.

He finally catches her staring at him. Suzy tightens her grip on the plastic bag in reflex, bracing herself for the impact. But that doesn't matter, because he says it anyway, candidly and all at once: "Suzy – what are we doing here?"

The last time they'd naturally run into each other was a year ago, at the Korea Drama Awards. Naturally, because Suzy might've stopped singing but Jinyoung had started acting, and their concurrent social circles began to bleed into one another's again. He'd gone home with the Best New Actor award, and Suzy had given him a standing ovation as he walked to the stage. She wondered if he'd seen her in the audience as he gave his acceptance speech with an almost robotic-precision. She almost tripped over her dress sitting back down.

"Hey!" she called out to him later. They had both their respective co-stars at each of their arms, in order to keep the conversation short and wholly impersonal. "Congratulations." She hoped he could tell she meant it.

Jinyoung smiled back at her. "Thanks." He looked to her, then her co-star, and then back. "You guys were great this year, too."

Suzy wanted to tell him about how he'd looked in the spotlight with his hair gelled back and that small award in his hands and how she'd gotten a glimpse of how he used to feel about her, watching through his TV screen. But that overstepped their social niceties, so she smiled and let someone take their picture for the four of them instead.

His hand lingered at her elbow for a moment after the flash. Like they were suspended in their own universe at that one point of contact, viscous, stuck in each other’s gravity.

And then he let go, with a perfectly polite smile. And Suzy watched him walk away from her just like how it went in all the best tragedies of her own making, the place where his fingers had touched her bare skin startlingly cold.

Suzy looks down into the mouth of that soju bottle, sitting in her sink. She'd bought the specific brand because Jieun showed up on the packaging, and she'd sent her a picture of it the day she first cracked it open. That was months ago, and she couldn't remember what they'd talked about in the aftermath. "I don't know," she responds, half-honest.

Back in her old apartment, Suzy had stayed up the night her first solo record had been released. After all the cameras had left at five in the morning, she'd crawled back out of bed and into her beat-up one seater in the living room, watching TV brainlessly while listening to her own disembodied voice sing through her phone speakers.

At five-thirty, Jinyoung sent her a text, unexpectedly. _how's the air up there? ㅎㅎ,_ it read alongside a screen shot of her EP sitting at number one.

 _ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ,_ she'd managed to reply after deleting several drafts. _what r u doing now?_ she sent him after another ten minutes. He'd read it and never replied.

One time, the lot of them and their old trainee friends went out for a meal. They'd opted for a tucked-in family owned restaurant that reminded them of a place they used to go before they'd all debuted, where the owners never forgot how Wonpil had spilled his water across the table. They laughed and drank and talked about their old dance teacher and Suzy tried not to stare at how the lights cast shadows across Jinyoung's face like they had in those dim practice rooms after-hours, when they sprawled on the floor like starfish and took turns either talking about everything that mattered to them or nothing at all.

"I remember," she'd said suddenly when the conversation had lulled. "When Jinyoung used to like me." Jaebum had told her before she'd gotten sorted into debut, and then she never had the chance to actually talk to him about it. By the time he'd debuted and they started crossing paths again, it'd been years and she assumed he was long over it.

Jinyoung stared at her for a beat before laughing. Suzy couldn't tell if it was genuine. "I don't think I ever told you," he pointed out from down the table. "Was it that obvious?"

She smiled into her beer bottle. "Yeah." But she didn't tell him how she'd stolen glances at him too, or how she wished that she had reached out for his hand before they'd grown out of their recklessness and became too scared to hurt other people like they learned they had the power to.

They left it at that that night. Waiting under the canary yellow street light as all the others dissipated back into their own lives, Suzy still thought she'd always have a chance with him as they compared their shallow footprints in the snow.

Now, Jinyoung looks at her like he's afraid he'll break her heart. He's never looked at her like this before, but to be fair, a lot of times Suzy likes to pretend that she's forgotten.

"What do you mean?" he finally asks, the same way he'd say _Don't do this, Suzy._ She feels it then, the prolonged detonation of this simultaneous heartbreak that's been hanging over them for years, ticking in time with the clock on the wall behind him.

Suzy takes a deep breath, feeling this strange oscillation of desire and trepidation in the pit of her stomach pulling her toward him and also pushing him further away. Maybe it was like this – the longer she bottled the feeling in, the stronger it fermented, and the more fervent the flavor turned. And when she finally removed the lid, she’d unleash a maelstrom that she’d lose herself in.

She tears her gaze away from the lemon-colored lip of the bottle. "I –"

She'd found Jinyoung's shirt in the back of her closet a few months back, when she was packing her things for the move. He'd lent it to her nonchalantly for a dance class a long time ago after she forgot to do her laundry, and she promised she'd wash it before giving it back, to which he grinned and told her, "Don't bother."

"You know," Jaebum said two weeks later before she could hand it to him to deliver back to Jinyoung. "Jinyoung has a huge crush on you."

She blinked. "Oh." And then Suzy lost the timing.

When Suzy was in primary school, she had this crush on a boy in her class. He was shorter than her, and he talked so much that the teacher would make him stand outside the classroom sometimes, but he was good at making everyone laugh. She drew him once with the rest of their classmates in crayon, and colored him in yellow.

"Which one's me?" he asked her when he peered over her shoulder. He made a face when she pointed at the one shorter figure. _"Ugh."_ His voice retreated as he settled back into his seat. "Why'd you use yellow?"

 _I wanted you to be my favorite color,_ she tried to tell him. But when she turned around, he wasn't looking at her anymore, and the moment was gone.

Jinyoung called her once, very drunk, a few years ago. It was around the time GOT7's contracts were facing renewal, and only he, Yugyeom, and Mark had decided to stay with the company. By then, they hadn't talked in ages, apart from the short text she sent him congratulating him for his last subunit debut that went unanswered more than half a year ago. His number had no caller ID, but she felt strangely compelled to pick up, anyway.

"Suzy?" he slurred into the receiver when the line connected. "Is that you?"

She'd been in Los Angeles for a photo shoot. When he went for his first KCON back when they were still loosely friends, he'd taken a picture at the beach, throwing up a peace sign and sent it to her. _is that haeundae ㅋㅋ,_ she remembers replying in between schedules. "Jinyoung?"

"Yeah," he replied. "Yeah – oh. I forgot I changed my number." There was noise coming through distantly from his side of the line. "But I still have yours." He hiccuped. “I still have yours.”

"Is everything okay?" she asked, pressing a tissue to the back of her neck in the hot sun.

Jinyoung laughed. "Suzy, I –" he began, and then the call dropped suddenly, and they needed her back on the set. When she finally remembered to call back, she was on her flight to Seoul and her phone was dead. Jinyoung hadn't contacted her since.

And Suzy broke up with her last boyfriend before she went on her drama shoot. Surprisingly, Dispatch had never gotten wind of their relationship, and with the privacy to, she tried to feel genuinely heartbroken about its end.

“Why do I feel like,” he’d told her at the door. Even though it had been a mutual thing, Suzy held onto this moment until it consumed her late nights, staring at her foreign hotel ceiling in a foreign city across the world. “Like you’re holding onto something – no,” he shook his head, and she looked up at him, “ _someone,_ and that’s holding you back from getting any closer to anyone?”

Suzy shot him her most practiced devastated look. In the absence of not sure of knowing whether she felt anything at all, it was an instinct learned from the time she’d spent in the limelight, even though the two of them had only been standing across each other in the entry way of her old apartment.

She thought of Jinyoung, suddenly. She hadn’t outgrown that part of herself either, and they’d been strangers in the guise of used-to-be-friends longer than anything else, but she imagined him turning around to look at her, the yellowing leaves of autumn framing his easy smile and the crow’s feet around his eyes.

“Maybe,” and her ex-boyfriend superimposed onto that image, facing her from where he’d been tugging his shoes, “Maybe you’re right.”

“Jinyoung.” Suzy exhales, thinking about how she’ll have this spot in her heart beating for the days they spent secretly snacking in the stairwell, wide-eyed and waiting to take hold of a future that was theirs, wearing their hearts on their sleeves. She stitched her own on, in goldenrod.

It’s been more than ten years since then. But here they still were, staring at each other from opposite sides of the room. Neither of them had moved forward or back – like they were suspended in their own separate universe, waiting for one point of contact. Viscous, stuck in each other’s gravity.

Suzy closes her eyes and free falls. “Why do you think we’re not together?”

At some point, when the fame became overwhelming, Suzy started testing people. It was a odd phase that only lasted a year, and it was only natural, then, that two nights after she moved into her first big apartment all by herself, she called Jinyoung.

"I'm lonely," she said as soon as he picked up the phone. Back then, she still knew his number and he'd been in a lull between promotional periods, before he’d started acting again. "You should come see me."

He showed up in front of her apartment half an hour later, complete with a huge Costco pack of facial tissues. "I thought this was a housewarming party," he'd joked as soon as he waddled through the entrance way, like the timer to their friendship had been paused only for them to comfortably pick up where they'd last left off. "You could've told me that the guest list was limited to one."

Suzy cracked a smile at that in kind. "Thought you wouldn't come otherwise." And then she gave him an entirely too-thorough tour of every fancy new feature of her apartment and proceeded to tell him she absolutely hated it. Jinyoung laughed.

Once when they were still trainees, Jaebum confided in Suzy about this big fight he'd been having with Jinyoung. The catalyst had been something hot-blooded and stupid that she couldn't quite remember the details of, but had blown up into the two of them giving each other the silent treatment for a week. “That doesn’t sound like Jinyoung to me,” she’d told him, truthfully, when he asked her what she thought about it.

Jaebum sighed, rubbing his forehead in agitation. They all shared dance classes and the occasional walks back to the dorms together and late nights before evaluations, practicing in front of mirrors with their earphones in. Maybe it was a stretch in the first place, to think that any of them had ever been close friends at all. “Yeah, well that’s because he acts different around you,” he told her. “Haven’t you realized?”

Back in her big, lonely apartment: “Do you remember,” she started. He’d indulged her as she dug her toes into her new sofa, still covered in a plastic sheet. “The company concert in 2012?”

They’d been driven back to the hotel early, as the only two who still weren’t old enough to drink, and he’d snuck into her and Fei’s shared room behind the staff’s back. They laid on her bed until everyone else came back, watching fancams of the night’s performances and laughing at themselves.

Jinyoung hummed in response and stared out her huge floor-length window, the city lights scintillating through the night. “Kind of,” he said, noncommittedly.

Halfway through one of 2PM’s performances, Suzy noticed Jinyoung looking at her. She turned her head on her pillow to face him. They stared at each other as the crowd went wild on his phone, and then he leaned in closer, as if to kiss her.

“Sometimes I think about,” Suzy tucked her hands under her thighs. Jinyoung didn’t look away from the window. “What could’ve –”

He’d recoiled at the last second before their lips could touch. “I don’t think we should do this, Suzy,” he whispered. She could feel his breath against her mouth, and her own heart fracturing in her chest.

Jinyoung looks at her now, from the other side of her kitchen island in her new _new_ apartment, nine years older than the boy who’d tried to let her down as gently as possible. Suzy had always thought him kind, but she suddenly wondered if he’d hurt himself in the process. She wondered if he hurt himself in the process.

“I think we both just want so much,” he measures out slowly. “And we’re afraid that this… idea of us together is better as a what if than reality.”

And for as long as Suzy’s known him, Jinyoung has had this innate tendency to measure his connections with people by how much he could potentially hurt them. As horrible as it could've been, this did not make him a bad person by nature, and he'd mostly outgrown the habit over the years – so much so that, even through his carefully constructed facade, Suzy could tell that he would try to break her hold on this thing she thought she’d keep inside of her, forever.

And he says, with finality and defeat, every bit the tragic hero of her own making: “But we can’t give each other that, Suzy.”

The Suzy that invited Jinyoung to her apartment six years ago wanted to see if he’d dare break her heart. She only asked because she didn’t think he would.

The Suzy of now finds the boy she fell in love with in the lines of the Jinyoung standing across from her. She pretends that she'll always have a chance with him.

She doesn’t know if she’ll ever learn how to outgrow that part of herself.


End file.
